


trade in these wings on some wheels

by polyproticamory



Series: Thunder Road [1]
Category: Stardew Valley (Video Game)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Getting Together, POV First Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-22
Updated: 2020-11-22
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:07:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27663131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/polyproticamory/pseuds/polyproticamory
Summary: I first saw him in the Joja Mart that had just opened in town. He was filling out an application for a part-time job, his tongue peeking out from his lips as he concentrated on writing his information neatly. I had a basket of canned beans and tomato juice, was counting out the change after calculating the total and tax, and then he was there, at the register, being trained by Morris in the operation of the till.
Relationships: Penny/Sam (Stardew Valley)
Series: Thunder Road [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2156757
Kudos: 17





	trade in these wings on some wheels

**Author's Note:**

> Title from a Bruce Springsteen song. 
> 
> I'm still working on my Elliott/Female Farmer story, but I was just playing the game this morning and saw Sam and Penny sitting on the bridge in the rain and this popped into my head. Kinda different than what I write in terms of style, I think. And I'm marking this as complete, and any continuation of this will probably be another standalone. Wrote it in one, too, so it's probably very messy, and I'll spend tomorrow cleaning it up. But I just wanted to get this out of my system and up here.
> 
> Hope you like!

Mom doesn’t have any good stories of dad, and I’ve never bothered to make up any daydreams of him on my own. I don’t think I was even aware of his absence until Maru had asked one day when we were in elementary school. She had skipped a grade and caught up to me, and asked with the bluntness of a child and the plainness of a scientist-in-training, if I had a dad.

“I don’t know,” I said. “What’s a dad?”

“Like a boy-mommy,” Maru said. “Everyone has at least two parents.” 

This statement induced so much panic that our teacher had to put me in the corner to calm down, called my mother, though she couldn’t reach her at work. Mom was working a short-distance truck driving job at the time and didn’t have a phone on her. When she ended her shift and got back to the hub, her manager relayed the message of my breakdown. She rushed to pick me up, and when we got home, my mom told me the truth. That my dad left before I was born, left my mother to try and scrape together a living that was enough for the two of us. That day was the first time my mother said:

“Ain’t no man who treats you good. Only ones doin’ you dirty, and ones who won’t hurt you.”

#

It was easy to ignore boys, then, because there were only so many living in Pelican Town—Maru’s brother Sebastian was like a brother to me, too, and Alex didn’t run in the same social circles as me and Maru—and only so much time I could spend with them anyway. After my panic attack at school, even at that early age, my mother wanted me home immediately. “I can’t go picking you up at all hours of the day, Pen. I need you to be good at school now, and come home right away. Y’hear?”

“Yes, mama.” 

And maybe it made for a lonely childhood. Except that for all the flaws my mother had, and there were many, the only thing she would indulge me in was buying all the books I could desire. The latest  _ Solarian Chronicles _ graphic novel, all of the books I needed for class, the nonfiction book about pesticides that was way above my reading level but had a calming green cover that looked sophisticated and grown up. During the summers I would take these books outside and lie down in the shade of the cherry tree next to the town square. Maru spent most of the summers at sleepaway camp, but when she was home she would join me with her own things to read, often an instruction manual for building another remote-controlled car. We passed the days of our girlhood this way, with the branches of the trees laden with fruit and our skin darkened—mine freckled to the point of becoming a patchy tan—by the sun.

At some point in middle school I realized how much my mother was spending on these books—especially with the truck company laying her off because she couldn’t afford a down payment on her own rig, and the payment she got from the bus company was barely enough to cover the water bill for our trailer because so few people bussed to Pelican Town anymore—and started going to the library. The library, then, became the only other place I could go after school. Mom was friendly with Gunther and he kept an eye on me, then eventually he wrangled me into helping him dust the bookshelves and return a few stray volumes to their proper place. The library collection wasn’t large, but it was still enough to keep me entertained from middle school, all the way through high school. Maru would join me, until she was eventually picked up by her mother or brother. 

I would stay reading until Gunther started shutting the computers down, would take my time putting the books on the circulation carts, would leave only when Gunther said with a small smile that it was time to head home.

#

Sam and his family moved into town during the summer right before sophomore year of high school. The house at the foot of the hill had sat empty for several years because of its tendency to flood in the summers when the nearby river would swell its banks during particularly bad storms. A team of contractors had come out during an oddly dry spring, hammers and drills echoing throughout the valley and breaking the usual stillness of the square. I could hear them all the way in my mother’s and my trailer, even with the river so close that it drowned out other sounds most of the time. Robin had supervised the renovations to the house, sealing off the basement and re-siding the exterior to make it more water resistant. When it was re-painted a lovely shade of robin’s egg blue, I envied whoever would get to live in such a beautiful home. When Sam and his mother Jodi did move in, they flew a Ferngill Republic flag from the eaves alongside the eight-spoked sun that denoted the Ferngill Army. Though we didn’t know when they first moved in, Jodi was pregnant with Vincent already, and Sam was the one who ran around town getting things for the house, running every errand, insisting that his mother rest, keep her strength, despite only being a little bit along.

I first saw him in the Joja Mart that had just opened in town. He was filling out an application for a part-time job, his tongue peeking out from his lips as he concentrated on writing his information neatly. I had a basket of canned beans and tomato juice, was counting out the change after calculating the total and tax, and then he was  _ there _ , at the register, being trained by Morris in the operation of the till. There were still a few people in front of me, most of them from out of town, lumberyard workers and fishermen who were driving to homes elsewhere, but this was the closest Jojamart for miles. And with each customer Sam took his time to count out the right change, bag the groceries, handed them over with a smile and a, “Have a nice day!” 

Morris, satisfied with Sam’s performance, left him alone at the register after some time to disappear into the back office. When I reached him, Sam grinned like he knew me, said, “Find everything okay?” 

“Mhm.”

My terseness didn’t dampen his spirit. He rang me up, told me the total, and accepted the bills and coins I carefully poured into his hands. He glanced up at me as the cash drawer popped out of the register. “Fifteen Gold,” he said, and I furrowed my brow. I had only handed him fourteen gold, sixteen cents. He slipped the bills in the drawer, then counted out the extra change. He held his hand up, fingers curled around the coins like he was doing a magic trick.  _ Now you see it, now you don’t _ . 

I held my hand out, palm up, slightly stunned. His fingers brushed against mine and he winked. “Let me bag these up for you, ma’am.”

“Penny,” I blurted out. He blinked, and I clarified. “My name is Penny. Not ma’am.”  _ I must be the same age as you _ , I thought, but didn’t say. 

“Penny ma’am,” he said, like the name was light enough to dissolve on the tip of his tongue. “Nice to meet you.”

“Yes.” I didn’t bother to correct him, and just watched him as he double-bagged my groceries so that the heavy cans at the bottom wouldn’t rip entirely through the flimsy paper.

#

Sam’s mom embedded herself as a member of the community, making casseroles for town potlucks and showing up regularly to the Yoba shrine every Sunday in the east wing of Pierre’s shop. When she started showing, most of the mothers of Pelican Town flocked to her, bringing freezer meals and maternity clothes, for it had been a while since Sam was born, after all, and she only kept so much of his old baby things. 

My mother didn’t join. When she saw Jodi walk across the bridge behind the trailer, laden with Joja Mart bags and waddling through the autumn leaves that fell early in the season, mom said, “That’s what happens when you let a man into your life, girl.” 

“She has a husband,” I said, scrubbing at a stubborn, dried piece of red beans on a plate. 

Mom snorted. “Fightin’ in that war. Not for long’s my guess.”

“Mother!”

“I guess she’s got that boy. Practically grown. He needs to be takin’ better care of her, though. Like you take care of me.” She shot a smile my way then, before taking another drag on her cigarette.

“He’s working right now.” I rinsed the plate when the food finally came unstuck. 

Mom looked at me out of the corner of her eye, then proceeded to blow smoke out of the open trailer window, her breath whistling slightly through the gap in her front teeth. 

#

My mom didn’t make any contributions to Jodi’s baby shower. I spent the day at Maru’s, and she, her mother, and me made a peach cobbler in the slow cooker with the first of the summer’s peach preserves, lasagne in an extra-large rectangular pan, and a number of smaller meals of wild rice and salmon that Sam could freeze and re-heat later, during the days when Jodi would be put on bed rest by the doctor. When we showed up at their house, the living room was decorated with pale blue streamers and there was music playing softly from the CD player in the corner. 

We loaded the pre-made meals into the freezer, plugged the slow cooker into a spare socket in the kitchen wall to keep the food warm, then joined everyone else in the living room. There weren’t that many people there, but there were enough to fill every seat. I sat wedged between Maru and the end of the couch, a glimpse of an open door into a room with crescent moon wallpaper and a wooden crib within my view. I accepted a blue plastic cup filled with punch and drank slowly, only half-listening to the conversation. 

I noticed when the CD reached the end of its tracks, though no one else did. Their conversations continued over the silence, though the sudden loss of the sound made me feel antsy. Maru was engaged in a conversation with Abby, another girl our age who was there with her mom, and they were talking about the coding class they shared. Jodi was talking with the other moms. Emily and Haley, the sisters who lived next door, were exchanging bawdy stories with Evelyn. I set my cup down and slipped out of my seat to the corner. 

There were a pile of CDs next to the small radio. An album of live recordings from Bruce Springsteen. Some pop country music.  _ The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill _ . An album of rock covers of pop songs. 

I heard a familiar laugh, and then Sam appeared in the doorway of another room I hadn’t noticed. He ran a hand through his shaggy hair—everyone had shaggy hair back then—and yelled at someone out of sight, smiling the whole time. He looked at the CD player, then noticed me standing there with one of the jewel cases of unmarked CDs that were also scattered along the table. 

“Penny ma’am!” Sam said, bounding over. In the few months that his family had been around, he had earned a reputation of unflagging energy, and I remember wondering what it was about him that gave him such feverish optimism, such perpetual movement.

“Just Penny,” I said, putting the case in my hand down on the table. We looked at each other for a moment, and I felt my face heat up, a blush forming against my will, as all blushes are wont to do. “How have you been?”

“Oh, you know, same old, same old. Hey,” he shuffled through the CDs, picking them up and flipping them to look at the track list, then setting them down, “you finish that essay for Mr. Bennington?”

“The...one due yesterday?”

Sam turned pink, though his tone was light. “Yeah, I asked for an extension a little bit ago when mom had a doctor’s appointment and needed someone to help her home. Anyway, I wrote a draft but have no idea if it’s any good. Do you think—?”

“Sure,” I said before he could get the question out. He looked at me with wide, blue eyes, and I felt my face turn redder. “I mean, yes, I can help you edit. Sorry, that’s what you were going to ask, right?”

“Yeah,” he said. He grinned. “Cool. Well, I’ll maybe get it to you tomorrow. Don’t want to take you away from the party.” He tilted his head towards the women gathered in the living room, then proceeded to replace the CD in the player with one of the unmarked discs. 

I looked over and felt my whole face turn tense as I tried to fight an even deeper blush. Though conversations continued uninterrupted, casual and light and on a totally different topic, almost everyone was looking at me. Granny Evelyn had even twisted to look over the back of the armchair she was sitting in. She grinned, then exchanged a knowing glance with Emily.

“Right,” I said. “Yeah, tomorrow’s fine. I’m free.”

#

I didn’t mean to like him. At first I avoided him as much as possible, crossing paths with him at school and only occasionally seeing him outside of that whenever he asked for homework help. We were in almost all the same classes, placed into the college track even though Sam frequently said, “Ah, I don’t know. I was thinking I was just going to work right after school,” whenever the high school counselor would ask about his college plans. 

Maru and I made most of our plans together. During senior year I would go over to her house after school, the two of us writing up drafts of our essays with Maru’s father giving feedback in blue pen. Though my list of schools was considerably shorter, since I could only look at schools that met full financial need, there were a few places where we overlapped, and we put all our focus into those schools for the chance to stick together throughout the four years. 

Every Friday night when Maru’s mother and father went to the Stardrop Saloon for their date night, my mother would converse with them shortly about what I was up to there. Was I keeping up with my studies? Did I eat too much of their food? Did that deadbeat son of theirs try anything funny? It’s a testament, I think, to Maru’s parents’ infinite amount of cool that they replied nicely to such rude questioning. I know all this because nothing stays quiet in a town like this. Pierre, the owner of the general store, would overhear the conversation while he stood at the bar, and then tell Caroline, his wife, about my mother’s belligerence and Demetrius and Robin’s unending patience. Abigail, Pierre and Caroline’s daughter, would overhear. Abigail would sometimes gossip with Maru, talked about what her parents were saying, and once asked Maru why she hung out with white trash like me. Maru was so mad when Abigail said that; Maru immediately asked the teacher to reassign her a partner during the robotics practical, and dragged me away at lunchtime from our usual table. 

“What? What’s wrong?”

“I’m not talking to that bitch,” Maru said, not even looking in Abigail’s direction. 

“What?!” I looked over my shoulder, almost tripping as Maru dragged me away. I saw Abigail sitting with Sam, glaring at her food, while Sam looked a little wary as he tried to keep up a one-sided conversation.

Sam had a growth spurt that turned him into a tall, lanky boy. His hair got a shade lighter, too, closer to a bright gold than the dirty blonde he had grown up with. He frowned when Abigail snapped something at him, and I looked away, if only to keep up with Maru’s quick pace through the lunchroom. 

The drama of those few days of the rift between Maru and Abigail felt larger in the moment, but truly they smoothed over quickly, with Abigail apologizing to Maru, and apologizing to me, too, though I didn’t care that she had said that behind my back. In those days, I came to feel embarrassed about my situation, though Maru kept repeating that I had nothing to be ashamed of, that I should instead be feeling proud for being able to rise above my circumstances and do so well for myself. Her encouragement only helped a little; in a way it only reinforced that there were bad circumstances  _ from which _ to rise. 

#

But our friendship continued smoothly. Maru and I made our final edits to our essays, typing them up and printing them on Sebastian’s computer. He and Sam hung out by the mountain lake while Maru and I worked, and most evenings I would pass the two of them on my way back home. At some point, this became Sam’s cue to stub out his cigarette and say goodbye to Sebastian. We took a slightly longer way, curving past the community center and Pierre’s store, rather than down the skinnier path that led right to the Mullners’ house and to my trailer. Though mom had gotten into the habit of staying at the saloon later and later, I didn’t want to take the chance that she would be home and see me walking home with a boy. 

No, not a boy, but a young man. His voice had taken on a somewhat raspy timbre when he spoke, not enough that it sounded painful like my mother’s voice, like her vocal chords were made of sandpaper. But when he spoke about something he had learned in his metalworking class, or in AP Music Theory, or a rabbit hole he started descending down when he came across something in his comic books and started researching it, the edges of his voice seemed to curl in on itself, like paper set on fire. I liked listening to him speak, liked seeing him in the dim lights along the walking paths, liked the fact that he would talk slowly with me, my short legs no match for his usual long stride. Sometimes he’d jump up and grab a tree branch, a sliver of his stomach visible from where his shirt would ride up, and then swing to land lightly in front of me, never losing the stride of his conversation. My eyes would get caught on the part of his shirt that clung, revealing a trim waist, skinny but strong. Those days, I felt brittle, bird-like with a heart fluttering fast in my chest. Rationalizing my body’s responses, trying to explain it away with hormones and pheromones and societal influences that inundated me with messages of what boys and girls can and can’t do together, didn’t do anything to stop me from feeling winded in Sam’s presence. 

After all this time, I still don’t have the courage to ask if he knew then what he would become to me. He smiles and says, “It was a love at first sight, babe. You in the shitty fluorescent light of the Joja Mart, but you were ethereal. A fairy princess. No, a queen.” 

I feel like I should be used to this, that such a cheesy compliment shouldn’t make me blush as much as I do. But even after all this time, after years, it’s like I only know what warmth is when he holds me, when his hands glide over the goosebumps on my arms, when my cheek is pressed against his chest, heartbeat right beneath my ear. 

#

Senior year, though. That winter was a tough one, with snows that piled high enough to cover our trailer entirely. Our generator kept us warm and the lights on, but after the first major snowstorm, Maru and her mother came through with a snowblower to carve a path from the trailer’s front door to the walkway that would connect to the rest of the town. The window in my room was completely blocked by the snow, only giving a weak light during the day as the winter sun filtered through the opaque white piles of ice. At times I laid down on the floor of my room and looked through, and I felt like I was just under the surface of a frozen lake, weightless, suspended, waiting for the spring. 

I didn’t see Sam until the Feast of the Winter Star. Vincent was old enough to be waddling around in Sam’s wake, grabbing small fistfuls of snow to try and make a snowball like Sam was showing him. Vincent’s strawberry blonde hair poked out from a knit cap that I recognized as one of Maru’s auto-knit ones. Sam was hatless, his hair unruly as ever, and his nose pink with cold. 

My mother and I found our gift recipients quickly—Emily and Evelyn respectively—so that we could get to the feast. I sighed when we sat down at the table, the space heater underneath providing warmth that seemed to thaw my toes and legs. Every bite of the food—roast chicken, mashed sweet potatoes, butternut squash soup, peppermint hot chocolate—warmed me from mouth to midsection so that my whole body felt filled with heat. 

Mom was in the middle of saying something when she stopped and looked behind me. I turned in my seat to see Sam standing with his hands behind his back. “Penny ma’am,” he said, eyes sparkling. 

“Hi, Sam.” I tried to be friendly, but cool, feeling my mother’s eyes on me. On him. On us. I was glad that my cheeks were already pink with cold, because I felt a flutter in my chest as Sam took one of the empty seats right next to me. 

“I got you for the Winter Star exchange,” he said, pulling a small box from behind him. He held it out to me and grinned. “Hope you like it.” 

“I’m sure I will, Sam.” I reached for it and tried to take it by the edge, as far from Sam’s hands as possible. I set it on the table, my fingers lingering only a little on the glossy wrapping paper.

“Well?” My mom broke in, and it was all I could do not to jump. But my eyes snapped to her and she swallowed a bite of food thickly. “Aren’t you gonna open it?”

Sam’s face was also pink from the cold, but seemed to grow pinker. “Uh, well.” He looked at me, and I met his gaze, before I looked down at the box on the table again. “Sure,” he said. “That’s, uh, cool.”

I tried to keep my hands from shaking too much as I pulled apart the wrapping paper. It was cold, so I could write it off as a shiver from the temperature, but under the careful gaze of my mother my nervousness seemed to radiate out from my stomach to my extremities. I opened the wrapping to find a journal, thick and leather-bound with a clasp like a belt buckle. 

“You’re always reading,” Sam said, his smoke-deepened voice even lower as he spoke softly to me. “I thought you might like to write sometimes, too.”

“It’s beautiful,” I said, trying not to sound so breathless.

I started to undo the clasp in front, but Sam reached out and placed his hand on mine. His glove was still cold from playing in the snow with Vincent and I flinched from the sudden iciness. Sam winced and drew his hand away. “Sorry. But, uh.” He looked at me and blinked a few times, licking his chapped lips, nervous, though his voice remained cool. “That’s it. Hope you like it.”

“I do. Thank you.”

“Yeah.” He stood up, then, smiling and still pink-cheeked. From the cold, I thought. “Anyway, Happy Winter Star, Penny. Ma’am,” he said to my mother, nodding his head and bowing a little bit. 

“Happy Winter Star, kid,” my mother said. She raised her glass of beer in his direction, then took a sip, all while never breaking his eye contact. 

Sam turned and scurried away. My hand was still on the cover of the journal, fingers on the buckle. Mom looked at me, and I looked away, removing my hand from the book and picking up my knife and fork. 

#

When school started up again after the break, and the winter dissolved into a crystal clear spring, Sam spent more time with me, even though spending time with me meant standing at the side of the road in the mornings waiting for the school bus with Maru, or spending study hall  _ actually _ studying, or sitting in the library after school to keep doing work. Though we were both seniors, and he didn’t apply to college, I could only handle waiting for decision letters in one way: by burying myself into my schoolwork until the world around me faded into a kind of earthy darkness, like when you close your eyes and hold your breath right before plunging into deep water. He sat on the same side of the table as me at the library, on my left side so that our hands didn’t knock together as often as we wrote out our homework. He sometimes hummed to himself while he puzzled through his Calculus homework, strains I recognized from the songs he would play for me during our shared lunch hour, the one time during the day we actually talked. 

Once he lent me a portable CD player, something slim enough that could fit into the side pocket of my backpack, and a set of earbuds. He also handed me an unmarked CD with “Penny ma’am” written on the jewel case in permanent marker. The track list was tucked into the front of the cover, his blocky, all-caps handwriting on notebook paper outlining the mix of songs. When I unfolded the paper, the other side was a cento composed of lyrics from the music he had chosen. Though the poem stepped around the idea of love, never directly referenced it, I could feel it at its inscrutable center.

The notebook he gave me sat at the bottom of my locker. I felt scared of opening it, for some reason, marking up the pages with imperfect penmanship, with words that didn’t match the beauty of the cover, the quality of the paper. And I didn’t want to keep it in my room in my trailer either, as my mother had picked up the habit of looking through my room when I wasn’t there. 

“Remember what I say,” she would say over dinner, sometimes unprompted. “Ain’t no man who treats you good.”

“Well,” I said once, before I took another bite of chicken pot pie. 

“What?”

“It’s ‘well.’ No man who treats you ‘well.’”

My mother grunted, and we passed the rest of the meal in our usual silence, and I counted down the minutes until she would heave herself out of her seat at the table, mumbling about the Stardrop. When she was gone, I would open up my backpack and take out the mix from Sam, listening to the music with one ear free of the earbuds. At the sound of my mother’s heavy footfalls on the path up to our door, I would turn the player off and tuck it away, the choruses stuck in my head. 

#

Why now? Why am I thinking about all this now? That time seems both so close and so far simultaneously, already years ago, and yet sometimes I feel like I’ve shrunk to fit into the skin of who I was. I’ve remained the same size, the same size and weight, as I was in high school, which doesn’t seem all that healthy given how much everyone else seems to have matured. Maru’s hips are hugged tighter by the overalls she’s had for years now, which she still wears when she’s working on her robot, or working with Sebastian on their parents’ car. Sebastian grew out of his weediness into a hardier, though no less wiry, build. Sam, though, has probably had the biggest outward change, though he remains the same unfailingly sunny person he was when he arrived in Pelican Town. 

He’s tall and broad, muscle building in a naturally bulky way that no one in town, not even Alex with his professional workout plan, could pull off. Sam’s bicep muscles swell then dip into a dimple just above the bends of his elbows. The fabric of his shirts stretch across a broad back, and hang slack over a slim, strong torso. Now, when he reaches up to get something from the higher cabinets in our apartment kitchen, I get a glimpse of a sprinkling of darker blonde hair that trails into the fronts of his jeans, which are tight enough to reveal the meat of his thighs, a round ass. He’s trimmed his hair to be less shaggy, though it still hangs in his eyes, and he has to toss his head to get it clear when his hands are busy. I notice this mostly when we make love, and he guides me onto his lap to ride him. As he leans back into the headboard, he tilts his head so that his hair flips to the side, and his blue eyes glitter in the dim light of the bedroom.

“Feel good?” he asks when he’s inside me, hand caressing my soft belly, his voice breathless. 

“Yes,” I gasp. “Sam, yes.”

He laughs, slides his hands around my hips and thrusts. The sensation sends me reeling, wrenches a gasp, makes me babble  _ more, please _ , and Sam delivers. 

Sam feels so good under me, and knows me so well that when I feel every touch building, swelling into something that will break, a wave rushing, he reaches up and grabs my chin to look at him. “That’s it’s Penny. That’s it.”

I come with a gasp and a quiet scream, eyes heavy-lidded and gazing into his as he tenses and still beneath me, too, following me to the shore.

#

Back then I would have been embarrassed to look at him so directly, felt wanton just staring at him. As the spring of our senior year moved on, he made more overt moves for my affections. He asked me to dances that he knew I wouldn’t be able to go to because my mother would lose it if I even brought up the subject. He bought me chocolates from whatever club was fundraising that week. He carried my books. He wasn’t part of a sport or any activity that would have earned him a varsity letter, but he found a vintage jacket in a thrift store, picked out the embroidered last name above the breast pocket, then sewed one of his father’s old military name patches in its place. I’d wear the jacket over my shoulders when I walked the halls with him, wore it in class (doubly useful, given that the classrooms were freezing), then kept it tucked away, safely, in my locker. 

At times I felt bad for the one-sidedness of our relationship. I couldn’t do much of anything for him in return, as the only possessions I had were my books and school supplies, and my mother drank most of our spending money away. When the bus line officially shut down due to a lack of passengers, our household budget was tightened even further to just the unemployment checks and whatever money I could scrounge from writing papers for some of the more desperate students in the school. I was definitely not good enough for him.

But the one time I brought it up, Sam’s eyes turned cool in a way that I didn’t know was possible, icy and hard and impenetrable. “That’s not true,” he snapped. We were walking home from Maru’s, water dripping from the tree branches that curved over the paths, leftover rain from the afternoon. He stopped in the path and gripped my hand. “Is that really what you think?”

“I—yes. Yes, it is. And it  _ is _ true.” I pulled my hands away, and he let me go easily. “I can’t do anything for you, Sam. I can’t even—”

Sam stepped in my path before I could walk away. “Can’t even  _ what _ , Pen?”

“I...I can’t even really be with you,” I mumbled, staring at the hollow between his collarbones, exposed by the stretched-out collar of his t-shirt. A pre-stretched collar, a pre-ratty t-shirt that he bought at the outlet mall one weekend when he went to Zuzu City with Sebastian. There was a hole in my sweater in the hem that I hadn’t yet sewn closed. 

He put his hands on my arms, and I must have flinched, tensed up, something, because he hissed and said, “Shit, sorry.” His hands dropped from me immediately, and he put them on his hips instead, his denim jacket winging open with the movement. 

I shook my head. “Do you see? I can’t...You can’t even...touch me without me…” I started crying then, the tears blurring my vision until the street lamps looked dazzling, my breaths coming in hiccups.

He rested his hands on my shoulders, slowly, as if afraid of frightening me, or perhaps frightened of himself. But my crying felt more controlled at his touch, less juddery, more silent and slippery so my breaths evened out. He slid one hand to my neck, up to cup my face until he could tilt my tear-stained face up to him. 

“I can touch you,” he said. “See? And you can be with me.”

“Sam,” I said. 

“Do you want to?” he asked, meeting my eye.

“What?”

“Do you want to be with me?”

His face was soft at the edges, the remnants of my tears filming my eyes. His face was starting to carve out the severe line of his jaw, and his eyelashes fanned and cast shadows on his cheeks. His eyes were dark, the light behind him turning his hair into a halo. 

“I want you to kiss me,” I whispered, embarrassed that I blurted the thought out, but not entirely ashamed. 

He grinned. “Whatever you like, Penny ma’am.”

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me procrastinating on [Twitter](https://www.twitter.com/cecaroliena).


End file.
